Kick Bug

Usually in animation I am fighting to get people to nor tone down what the previous artist did or them. Layout artists tone down the storyboards Animators tone down the layouts. Assistants tone down the animation until the images on the screen have no life to them.
I never had to worry about this with Kelly Armstrong's animation. I wish I had the layouts to show you, but she actually took the poses much farther.
Usually when I send my poses to another land - even Canada, the animators don't believe the drawings and "fix" them for me by taking out the line of action, specific expressions and exaggeration.



















http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/KellyKickBug.mov

From Layout Poses To Animation - I'm outta here Jack

Thanks to Ted, I can show you the kind of drawings we send animators. We draw the basic poses, and sometimes I go in and add some acting poses to go with the dialogue. I write timing notes on the odd layout if I have a certain idea I want.


And if we are lucky we get a good animator like Kelly who plusses the scene when she animates it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/KellyOutJack.mov

Carbunkle 2 - Ren's Romantic Dream

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Somewhere in between the storyboard poses and the animation we do layout poses as I showed in the Dave Feiss post. There are usually more layout poses than storyboard poses, because I get in there and fiddle with them.


In this case, Kelly Armstrong worked from the basic layout poses but added a lot of her own - without straying from the context of the scene at all. All her poses only strengthened the scene and made it more individual and more real.Here's the basic layout pose above which only tells you that Ren is having a romantic dream and that he thinks Stimpy is a beautiful human woman.

Kelly, again listened really closely to the soundtrack and drew expressions to match every inflection in my voice. She also exaggerated far beyond what anyone was used to seeing at the time. Even me.

These are pretty close to the layouts.
Kelly added the lips and all the specific mouths.



Holy Cow! Any other studio would fire you for drawings like this!

Back to layouts.





Unfortunately this beautiful scene got cut when the cartoon first aired. It was deemed too "homosexual". Even though I think there were gay people working on both sides of the production.

It actually isn't remotely homosexual. If anything it's "homophobic". Once Ren wakes up and realizes he's kissing Stimpy and not a girl, he freaks out. It's also species-o-phobic, when you think about it.

If you wanna still frame through -it, you'll see a lot of amazingly crazy Kelly drawings.
I want to point out again that they aren't randomly crazy; not merely for their own sake. They all drive the point of the scene home, right down to its minutest details. This is entirely different than say a Jim Tyer, who can sometimes just be crazy for crazy sake, without regard to character or to what the scene is about. That's still more entertaining than blandness, but it's much harder to be creative and stay within context.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/KellyCucaracha.mov